Gallup Poll: Fewer Dems in Church, Majority ‘Seldom or Never’ Attend

A Gallup poll released Monday highlights the religious spilt between Democrats and Republicans, showing that 52 percent of Democrats seldom or never attend church. And the percentage of Democrats who attend church weekly has dropped two percentage points – down from 29 to 27 percent – since the first quarter of 2008.

Not very surprising. This mundane facet of the Church in the United States is the thing that’s changed, even though none of the doctrine & big-T-tradition has.

I’m always amused when people try to make one or the other article of tradition or doctrine completely equivalent with the Democrats or the Republicans. Don’t they know that the Church, including her tradition & doctrine, predates American political parties? The world does not revolve around us. Newsflash: American Catholics constitute about 5% of the international Catholic church. *We* are the peanut gallery.

Not surprising, but very sad, at least to me. The Catholic Church becomes less catholic to the extent that it becomes the Republican Party at prayer. There are a host of social problems on which reasonable Catholic minds can differ as to the best solution: examples include illegal immigration (deportation or amnesty), violent crime (death penalty or life in prison), foreign policy (nemo me impune lacessit or “she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy”). If we lose Catholic Democrats, we lose their perspectives on these issues.

Obviously the Democratic Party is driving Catholics away with its uncompromising support for abortion, contraception, and homosexual “marriage.” I remain a registered Democrat – it’s the only way I can cast a meaningful vote in the City of Pittsburgh’s elections – but I haven’t voted for a Democrat for state or national office in years.

The pro-abortion platform is not new. It dates at least to the 1999 rewrite. So, why has it taken good Catholics so long to leave the party? With such a platform, and look up the writing of this yourself, as it was a process which started in the 90s, why didn’t Catholics who are Dems. attempt to change the platform? But, the other issues you list are equally egregious and I have not seen Catholic Dems. come out against those either. Ever since the Clinton era, there must have been some Catholics who saw the rot in the party and yet did nothing. On the local level, at least in the Midwest, the issues were the same. So, how can there be any issue greater than Life, and how can a Catholic support a party which had POTUS, whose Illinois anti-life record is astounding, as a candidate? I am glad you haven’t voted as such, but I am the only Catholic in my family who does not vote Dem. and this has caused the family Dems. to basically not talk to me at all-so much for Christianity.

This is tragic. An equivalent thing has happened in Canada and I’m sure many other parts of the world.

Christ transcends any one party, and unless we want a one party system, or a series of polarizations where the party that wins spends most of its time undoing everything of the previous party did, something has to change.

It’s also tragic on the spiritual level, since it leaves a whole generation of people away from God because they disagree on politics.

We can’t, of course, vote for anyone who aligns with the culture of death, but what are we doing to reach the lost “Christmas and Easter Catholic” souls who have been brainwashed into thinking that it is a virtuous to serve both Christ and Baal? If we don’t reach them while they occasionally come to Church, how can we hope to reach them while they are far off?

I don’t think most people spend much time thinking about political party platforms. I don’t, anyway.

Nor do I think that registering as a Democrat so that I can vote in local primaries constitutes support for the party on a national level. I’ve never given any money to the party or to any of its candidates. I just want to vote in the primaries.

Finally, when you claim that support for amnesty, life in prison, and a less militaristic foreign policy are “egregious,” I think you are stating your own views and not the views of the Church. The Church takes no dogmatic position on those issues, and you will find many Church leaders who support them. To provide just one example, Bishop Slattery of Tulsa, who has been justly praised on this site for his work in fostering the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite Mass and his decision to celebrate the Ordinary Form ad orientem, recently gave a statement on immigration that was “egregious” by your definition. He said, in pertinent part:

“These [illegal immigrants] are not unknown to us. They live in our neighborhoods and pray with us at Mass. We benefit every day from their labor in framing and painting our houses, roofing our office buildings, finishing new cement for us, harvesting and processing our food, and serving us in our restaurants. These men and women broke the law by entering the country illegally; but they did this with the tacit permission of the federal government and most have since become part of the fabric of everyday life in America …. Some way must be found to give the 11-12 million undocumented workers presently in the country some form of legal status.”

If your position is that any Catholic who retains any tie to the Democratic Party or who supports any of the issues I’ve described is “egregious,” then I am not surprised to hear that your family members are giving you a hard time about it – because it’s a rather extreme position.

Support for amnesty is not a Catholic view. It is a simplistic, unreasonable and dangerous political/social view of people who seem to have a tendency to think with their heart instead of their brain. While I respect Bishop Slattery’s liturgical perspective, his statement on the matter of amnesty is nothing more than a personal opinion of his own, not directly supported by the Magisterial teachings of the Church, and one that I see as being incredibly naive and ill informed. It may also have a lot to do with where one’s compassion and sympathies lie. With his country and his countrymen, his family and his children, or the invading hordes that are coming over the border in complete disregard for our country’s laws, way of life, welfare, or sustainable future.

I might also add that Bishop Slattery has nothing to lose in the fight over amnesty. He won’t be priced out of the job so to speak and his standard of living will not be affected through amnesty. Now as for all the other working class stiffs out there, they have a little more skin in the game. And that is one of my major gripes about certain members of the clerical class when they pontificate on some of these debatable social justice positions. Be it amnesty or universal single payer healthcare. Some of us are actually trying to live our lives and be open to the fullness of life in our marriages, all the while certain clerics vocally support certain social policies which are going to have a direct negative effect on our ability to do so. The solution to the Mexican immigrant problem lies in Mexico, not the U.S. These are not people fleeing some type of disaster thereby binding the U.S. under the Church’s social teaching to provide them with a way of life. And in contrast, Americans have a right under the Church’s social teaching to preserve what has been handed down to them by past generations so that they can themselves pass it down to the generations yet to come. Primarily their children.

Supertradmum – I live in a state that had no real members of the Republican party until the 1960’s. As a child growing up in a small rural town, there were Catholic Democrats, there were farmer Democrats and there were racist Democrats and that’s about it. The situation continues in many places where the Democratic party is pretty much the only party. A lot of it goes back to the Civil War and reconstruction. My state regularly elects democratic senators and representatives who vote as Republicans. It’s a strange phenomenon, I know. But it exists. Please don’t be so quick to chide Joe for voting in Democratic primaries at the local level. For some, it’s the only choice that exists.

I am intrigued and assume you grew up in the South. Still, we need to be educated about our choices. I grew up in Iowa, where politics are the drug of choice. You cannot believe how the conversations in pubs, schools, hairdressers, etc. all revolve around political debate. The Iowa voter is traditionally a student of every nuance of politics, and it is serious business that we have the caucus system, at which, I have been a representative myself in years past. I watched two friends of my parents who were very pro-life spend their energies and time trying to change the Democratic Party to no avail. As Catholics, we must try very hard to influence local, state and federal elections. One can always start another party…

Within the US, some people just cannot get their heads wrapped around the fact that Catholics aren’t penniless immigrants who “speeka da funny talk” and that they don’t hand their votes over to the Democratic party ward bosses in exchange for some puny favor.

For one, the news media particularly has it firmly wedged in their heads that Catholics are, have always been and will always be blue-collar workers, but they’re wrong. Most Catholics aren’t! For one thing, the US almost doesn’t have blue-collar workers, and for another, Catholics worked hard in the 20th century to blend into the rest of the culture economically and they succeeded.

Perhaps I should have linked to Bishop Slattery’s entire essay. It makes clear that Catholics are free to devise whatever solution they like to the problem of illegal immigration, provided that it balances two truths: 1) nations have a right to keep order and to secure their borders; and 2) immigrants are our brothers and sisters in Christ, whom we must welcome. There is obviously a tension between these two truths, and Catholics can emphasize one so long as they don’t ignore the other. In this sense, illegal immigration is very different from abortion in that there are a range of acceptably Catholic views on illegal immigration, but only one acceptably Catholic view on abortion.

You certainly have a right to emphasize the need for secure borders. But when you call immigrants – many of whom are our fellow Catholics – “the invading hordes,” I think you may be forgetting the need to welcome the stranger as we would welcome Christ.

Perhaps I should have linked to Bishop Slattery’s entire essay. It makes clear that Catholics are free to devise whatever solution they like to the problem of illegal immigration, provided that it balances two truths: 1) nations have a right to keep order and to secure their borders; and 2) immigrants are our brothers and sisters in Christ, whom we must welcome.

He never says they should be welcomed, which would imply permanent status. Rather he says that they should be given “some sort of legal status. This need not include citizenship . . . ” Such legal status would include work visas.

“Invading Hordes” is exactly what they are as a group. As a group they are no different than the barbarians who invaded Rome. The means by which they are invading our country may be different. One was by brute force, the other is by using our very own broken federal government and broken system of laws against us. Using what seems to me a much more accurate description of the true nature of the situation than the “welcoming a neighbor” attitude is in no way an indication that one would not welcome a stranger on an individual person to person level. I don’t believe I would ever report an illegal immigrant to INS for instance, but as a societal/national policy matter I certainly see the need to take a strong stance against the La Raza agenda and the very real danger posed by unfettered mass migrations of people. No society has ever survived the type of mass migration/invasion of peoples that our country is undergoing right now. That is just a historical truth.

And it seems to me that the second truth you outlined above is not 100% applicable to this issue anyway, because it ignores the fact that these people are criminals who violated the law. A law that is in no way unjust because as stated in the first truth, a country has a right to secure borders and to keep order. I don’t agree with Bishop Slattery’s position that our system of laws has victimized those very people who have abused it and attempted to take advantage of it. And as for the Catholic argument, I personally have never found the Mexican immigrants to be particularly Catholic. In many ways they are more Modernist and secular than the average American cradle Catholic. So I don’t really know what Mexicans being culturally Catholic has to do with anything.

He never says they should be welcomed, which would imply permanent status.

Why does welcoming someone imply permanent status? When I worked as a hotel front-desk clerk in college, I welcomed lots of people to the hotel. I didn’t think any of them were going to stay there forever.

He never says they should be welcomed, which would imply permanent status.

Why does welcoming someone imply permanent status? When I worked as a hotel front-desk clerk in college, I welcomed lots of people to the hotel. I didn’t think any of them were going to stay there forever.

Simple. People stay at hotels, with very few exceptions, temporarily. But the main issue is not whether the undocumented stay here temporarily but rather whether it is permanent.

Seriously, this is why it is curious that there are Catholics who want the Church to Episcopalize. All you need to do is look at the pile of smoking rubble that mainstream Protestantism to realize that signing on to secular progressivism is death. Of course they stop going to church! The destruction is already accomplished, so what is the point of going when anywhere one can get political correctness, massive guilt about not drinking freely-traded coffee, and piles of excuse making for sexual perversion without having to waste an hour on Sunday?

jhayes,
Problem is, there are so many people who self-identify as “cultural Catholics” but haven’t darkened the door of a church since they were baptized.
There’s a similar problem with people who self-identify as Jewish. Many of them are Reform, or even “Reconstructionist” or “Humanist” and never go to shul. So there’s a tremendous social and political divide between “observant” and “non-observant”.
The only groups that come to mind with a similar cultural element are the Mormons and the Southern Baptists. But the Mormons and the strict Southern Baptists will ‘disfellowship’ you if you don’t go to church (the latter on Wednesday nights as well as Sundays!), which pretty well takes care of the cultural-identification problem.
The Episcopalians used to have a cultural (social climbing) component, but since the Social Register no longer requires that you be Episcopalian or Presbyterian, and you can now believe in anything, most Episcopalians believe they’ll just sleep in on Sundays.
If you struck out the cultural Catholics from the numbers, I think you’d see a higher percentage of church attendance.

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The more vigorously the primacy was displayed, the more the question came up about the extent and and limits of [papal] authority, which of course, as such, had never been considered. After the Second Vatican Council, the impression arose that the pope really could do anything in liturgical matters, especially if he were acting on the mandate of an ecumenical council. Eventually, the idea of the givenness of the liturgy, the fact that one cannot do with it what one will, faded from the public consciousness of the West. In fact, the First Vatican Council had in no way defined the pope as an absolute monarch. On the contrary, it presented him as the guarantor of obedience to the revealed Word. The pope's authority is bound to the Tradition of faith. … The authority of the pope is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition.

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"One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting."

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